Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

Ecological issues have become central in public discourse, with almost all activity in the fields of transportation, infrastructure, industry and agriculture spurring a lively debate on their environmental impact. The discussion long ago went beyond the limited themes of protecting nature reserves, wild animals and plants, and has begun to bite into sacred myths about the "conquest of the wilderness" and the dressing of the land "in a frock of cement and concrete."

Many people understand that the old Zionist slogans have become a tool in the hands of cynical real estate sharks and that continuing the cult of development will lead, if it has not already done so, to an environmental disaster that could destroy the health of Israeli society. Many activists who are worried about the environment's fate avoid radical statements about shattering the Zionist dream so as not to send the debate - harsh in any case - over to the political arena, which would make the environmental struggle even more difficult.

One way of confining the debate to areas ostensibly untainted by the question of the "future of the territories" is to completely ignore that not only Israel's citizens depend on the environmental resources, but also millions of Palestinians. The numbers that fuel the environmental debate in Israel - from population density to water and air pollution, from motorization to electromagnetic radiation - are examined only with regard to Israel within the Green Line.

This line, although some people still believe it has a geopolitical significance, is fictitious in terms of environmental considerations. This becomes apparent along the route of the security fence. The absurdity grows when one realizes that the Israeli environment includes the settlements, while the Palestinian population - about 4 million people - and their communities are not included in this "environment." As if they are on another planet.

"The environment" does not know ethnic fences. More than 10 million people living west of the Jordan depend on the same water resources and breathe the same air, swim in the same sea and use the same communication frequencies.

But including the Palestinians in the Israeli environment ostensibly means annexation, or at least recognizing that the occupation is not temporary; that is how political disputes become enmeshed in ecological discourse.

Only two issues are considered relevant in environmental discussions: demography and water. Both reveal a division of resources that Israelis consider reasonable: The Palestinians, who make up about 40 percent of the population in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, should have about 11 to 15 percent of the land, while per-capita consumption of water resources for the Palestinians should be about one-fourth that of the Israelis.

This extreme inequality comes to the fore in the huge gap in the per-capita Palestinian and Israeli gross domestic product, which is 1:10 in the West Bank and 1:20 in the Gaza Strip. Only the assumption that such gaps will persist in the future makes it possible to ignore the Palestinian factor. After all, the use of environmental resources is a function of income and living standards; if these rise, energy and water use and motorization will increase, and demand will grow for recreation services and trips to the beach.

The concern that the Palestinians will endanger the Israeli monopoly and will demand a more just distribution of environmental resources has led to the creation of a bureaucratic-economic-military system. This system ensures full control over every factor or process that might hurt the quality of life of Israel's citizens and the privileges they have accumulated during the Zionist enterprise.

This system - called in sanitized language "the occupation" - is not a military occupation, a takeover of lands and a temporary situation that will end when peace comes, but a permanent situation in which even those who are struggling to end it are partners in achieving its latent goal. The goal is for the Palestinians not to consolidate economic power that will "steal" environmental resources from Israelis.

That is the real goal of the regime of closures, the strangulation of physical planning and especially the prevention of Palestinians from working in Israel: to ensure that the Palestinians remain in their backward condition. This will not pry away the environmental resources, which will remain an internal Israeli matter.

It seems to Israelis that they have the power to maintain this monopoly on the environment indefinitely, but this is a dangerous illusion. After all, they do not have the power to stop Palestinian population growth or even the rise in their living standards, which will affect the bitter struggle we can expect over the distribution of environmental resources. Only if these influences become a part of public discourse will the way we deal with ecological issues be complete.

It is hard to say who was responsible for fueling the recent uproar over warnings that Palestinian protesters would try to break through the borders and checkpoints of the Gaza Strip. Was it the defense establishment, or perhaps the media? In any case, the hysteria-mongers succeeded all too well, for the mountain became a molehill. The artillery batteries and thousands of Israeli soldiers who stood before a few thousand Palestinian children turned the Israeli response into a fiasco.

Of course, it was impossible to admit afterward that the defense minister and military chiefs had panicked. They spent hours debating how to thwart the danger of a Palestinian march and what would be the appropriate response if the marchers broke through the fence, which apparently they never planned to do. Predictably, army officials claimed later that the massive military preparations prevented the Palestinians from attempting such a clash. The Palestinians, meanwhile, boasted that a mere false warning was enough to exhaust the Israeli army.

The tempest that never was disappeared quickly, but those involved are convinced that it was merely a practice run for an event that will occur in the near future  because a clash between the Israel Defense Forces and an unarmed Palestinian crowd is inevitable.

This feeling has haunted Israelis since the mid-1950s. The nightmare in which "refugees march in droves to their abandoned homes" has been expressed in quite a few literary works, and it came up as a realistic prediction in the scenarios for which the IDF has prepared several times since 1967. This scenario frightens the army more than a violent conflict with armed Palestinians.

Israelis are used to the Palestinians being either violent or docile; nonviolent resistance creates a serious dilemma. A forceful response leading to unarmed casualties, among them women and children, will play into the enemy's hands. More than the army fears bad press and international criticism, it is concerned that the solidarity of the Israeli public and its support for the security forces might splinter if parts of the public protest against the excessive use of force and come to doubt the IDF's commitment to its own ethical code, its famous "purity of arms."

The fear that nonviolent protest will take root among the Palestinians has accompanied the conflict for many years, and the response of the Israeli authorities to nonviolent protest has been no less severe than their reaction to violent acts. We can recall the fury with which [Palestinian activist] Mubarak Awad was treated during the 1980s, when he tried to organize a group of Gandhi-style passive protesters.

The way to prevent the spread of nonviolent resistance is to threaten that it will be met with a violent response, including the use of firearms, in the hope that the threat will be taken seriously, serve as a deterrent and preclude the need to follow through and actually use such means. And indeed, until now the deterrence has worked: the Palestinian population is showing little willingness to adopt a strategy of nonviolent resistance.

This may be because such a path is incompatible with its nature, or because the Israelis have managed to persuade the Palestinians that they have no inhibitions when it comes to using force, even gunfire, against unarmed protesters, and that they make no distinction between violent and nonviolent demonstrations. Therefore, the nuances of the Satyagraha philosophy preached by Mahatma Gandhi make no impression on Israelis. On the contrary, nonviolent resistance might give them an excuse to tighten the siege and closure.

The Israeli checkpoints throughout the West Bank might attest to the success of the deterrence policy and the failure of the nonviolent resistance strategy. The dozens of checkpoints, manned by small groups of young, inexperienced and frightened soldiers, are meant to announce symbolically who has the power to control the lives of the ruled. The soldiers usually act without using force, taking advantage of the Palestinians' fear and arrogantly relying on a mentality of submission.

It never occurs to the occupiers that the occupied might dare to defy the code of conduct imposed on them, and that the checkpoints of oppression might become the barricades of an uprising. And so the balance between deterrence on the one hand, and rage and vengeance on the other, continues - an explosive, dangerous balance.

On April 13, 1919, tens of thousands of Indians gathered outside the great temple at Amritsar in Punjab and demanded an end to British rule. A British officer, who believed that reliable deterrence hinged on an "appropriate response," gave his (local) soldiers the order to open fire. In the course of 10 minutes, 1,650 bullets were fired, killing 379 Indians and injuring 1,500. The Amritsar massacre united the Indians behind Gandhi and ended what remained of the British pretense to enlightened rule.

Every foreign occupation has its Amritsar. In Gaza, a catastrophe has been prevented, but the balance remains explosive, and dangerous.

The prize for the most sharply cynical remark goes to President George W. Bush, who said in Ramallah of the Israel Defense Forces crossing points: "You'll be happy to hear that my motorcade of a mere 45 cars was able to make it through without being stopped." No doubt, he was speaking ironically, but even if he added that he wasn't "so exactly sure that's what happens to the average person," he should be reminded of the saying that one doesn't mention rope in a hanged man's home. Okay, so there's a lack of political and human understanding here, but isn't there even a drop of sensitivity and empathy?

This cynical remark made only the slightest impression on those who heard it. After all, the people who met with Bush are not the ones who are exposed to the humiliations that thousands go through at the barriers every day, and they even receive VIP treatment. Why should they express dissatisfaction with a spontaneous bit of nonsense when they feel no need to react to a stupid thing that someone in Bush's retinue formulated for the president? "Swiss cheese isn't going to work when it comes to the outline of a state. And I mean that," declared Bush. Right after that he said the drawing up of the future border will reflect the current reality. But it is the reality of the settlement blocs that has created the "Swiss cheese."

And really, what's the point of fussing over trivia when the very fact of the event is the embodiment of cynicism? The president of the United States visits a bunch of Palestinians who deck themselves in lofty titles, as though they represented a sovereign authority, and discusses a peace with them that will lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state within a year. These leaders owe their existence to the protection of the Israeli occupation - which of course they condemn and about which they managed to wring from the president a comment on the "need to end it." And they owe their survival to unprecedented financial aid.

With appalling cynicism, they have pretensions to conducting negotiations to end the conflict when they do not represent even one-quarter of the Palestinian population - the part that lives in the West Bank. They are discussing "the core issues" of the conflict when the core of their efforts is to get that huge sum of money that was promised them at the Paris conference. That money will come to them only if they concentrate on the appearance of negotiations. Those billions will allow them to go on supporting their inflated bureaucracy and their system of charitable handouts that covers most of the Palestinian population in the West Bank. But it is impossible to come complaining to a bunch of losers who are trying to survive. The leader of the only superpower is using them to improve his own position. Clearly, when he doesn't need them anymore and finds that he has no use for them, he will toss them to their fate without a moment's hesitation.

Bush and Abu Mazen (PA President Mahmoud Abbas), for whom cynicism is their means of survival, are joined by the greatest cynic of all, who has made cynicism into an art. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert can give Bush and Abbas lessons on how to spin a story that exploits the hopes of naive people and relies on the feeling that if important people are busy with something, it is a sign that this something is important.

Olmert's cynicism is astonishing. He says bombastic things about how he was "elected with a broad diplomatic agenda, wants to bring about an agreement and intends to realize his vision." He is conducting negotiations in the prior knowledge that he is not capable of moving them ahead and completing them, never mind implementing them. He is intentionally blurring the difference between a theoretical "shelf agreement" and an agreement for which there is a commitment to implement it. Since he will never arrive at the first, there is no need to worry about the implementation of the second. Olmert is wringing every last drop out of people's desire for peace and will unashamedly exploit the weakness of the Palestinians, who are having to conduct peace negotiations, ostensibly, when scores of them are being killed by the Israeli army.

All means are justified to survive politically - all three cynics need each other in order to survive.

Poor Ehud Barak. All he did was repeat recently the "there's no partner" formula he bequeathed to the Israeli discourse after his failure at Camp David and during the intifada - the formula that has become a consensus uniting right and left. And now he is discovering that the very same formula being explained as his attempt to "pass Benjamin Netanyahu on the right" is being described as a blow to the first signs of a diplomatic process. It is being condemned as interfering with the consolidation of new diplomatic programs. He is also accused of defying the leadership of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is suddenly being described as a responsible leader hoping for a two-state solution.

Barak has not changed his views; after all, the diplomatic-security situation has not changed. Some people even think it has worsened because severing the West Bank from the Gaza Strip makes the chances for an agreement less likely. In addition, the power and authority of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and the PA in the West Bank have been undermined, Israel continues to control the West Bank, there is nothing new in the diplomatic plans and the ability to implement them, and the United States has lost the strength to use pressure to realize the plans. Barak will do everything he can to prove that "there is no partner."

In that case, why did his words provoke such a hostile reaction? Because commentators, experts and columnists adapted their response to their new mood. Until now they needed the "there is no partner" formula. Now, when they are becoming devoted to the illusion of the peace process, they have turned the formula and its inventor into party poopers.

It's not Barak who has changed, and it's not the situation that has changed. Only the pundits have changed.

With the Camp David failure and the outbreak of the second intifada, the Israeli public needed a narrative that would unite its parts, justify its deeds and allow it to deal with a difficult situation while describing the situation as a war for survival. The narrative presented by Barak, in which he offered the late PA chairman Yasser Arafat the moon and Arafat chose violence instead, has become resistant to any contradicting argument, fact or evidence. Barak and his disciples have succeeded in convincing the Israelis that the Palestinian rejection of the generous and unprecedented offers led to the wave of violence, and that the Palestinians are not ready to end the conflict, which is not territorial but stems from their refusal to accept Israel's very existence.

The "there is no partner" formula is what led to the peace camp's destruction. Anyone who dared present a more complex picture was accused of supporting the enemy. This narrative, which still dominates in describing the past, does not suit the new mood Olmert is nurturing for his own reasons. This mood is being eagerly adopted by people who until recently proclaimed the "there is no partner" formula and are now marketing its opposite.

It's amazing to see how Olmert, who was humiliated and ridiculed, has suddenly become "the person responsible for the policy of peace and security." He is obliged to "restrain" the defense minister, who dares to challenge his leadership. Olmert, who wants to appropriate the Palestinian issue, is keeping Barak away from any contact traditionally under the defense minister's aegis, and is trying to give him orders. But the pundits' decree is unequivocal: Barak's motives are personal; he is undermining the process out of fear that someone will succeed where he failed. And none of this prevents them from continuing to demand that the Labor Party leave the government and Olmert be replaced.

It's not a good idea for those who are suddenly discovering the missing "partner" to attack Barak with such fury and make light of his assessments, because there is a good chance the old slogan will come back and be useful. After the buds of the new diplomatic process have wilted under the care of gardeners Olmert and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Barak proves that he is not only a commentator, they will once again unashamedly raise the tattered flag of "there is no partner."